From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] sam command language From: "rob pike, esq." In-Reply-To: <20031007191642.3308.qmail@g.bio.cse.psu.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 12:20:32 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 661b366e-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > Alternatively, do what perl does: punctuation uses backslash > to turn the magic off, letters use punctuation to turn it on. > So \a and \z could be the end markers. You'd seldom type > that, so they're free to use. This breaks the rules we worked so hard to establish in Plan 9 regular expressions: \ is used only to make something unmagic. The double meaning of \ in Unix and especially Perl REs is regrettable at best. -rob